


Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make

by Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)



Category: Crusade
Genre: Gen, Like a live-action Myst game, Puzzles, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:54:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/pseuds/Aris%20Merquoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nor iron bars a cage, but being trapped inside one with Max Eilerson is nothing like a hermitage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alexcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexcat/gifts).



Dureena didn't want to admit that splitting a fingernail made her stop working, but there it was. She had spent three hours methodically going over every surface of the room, checking loose mortar, wiggling cornices, scaling walls, tapping on paving stones, and digging with her fingernails at every loose piece of gravel she could find. Her prison cell (so she was starting to think of it) was no more than three meters by three meters, with ochre-red brick walls broken up by paint and colored tile and partially reclaimed by climbing vines (not strong enough to bear her weight, even for a minute) and lit by a distant skylight which had once held glass. There was no sign of the chute which had dumped her and her companion into the place, as despite the apparent age of the walls the mechanism had slid behind a stone with no way of opening it up again. She'd given it her all, and now her fingernail had broken to the quick, and she saw that as a sign it was time to pause, curse a few times, and suck the bleeding finger into her mouth.

Max Eilerson looked up from his notebook briefly, then went back to writing.

She pulled her finger (left, third finger, not her strongest or most dexterous but good for balance) from her mouth, spat out a scant mouthful of coppery blood, and said, "You could make yourself useful, you know."

Max looked at her over his glasses. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said, before turning back to his book. "I thought I was. Despite all the clever things you've been doing, you haven't figured out the exit yet, have you?"

Dureena sucked on her finger again, and this time when she spat out the blood, the clump of salt-slick saliva landed much closer to Max.

"I'll take that as a no." Max pursed his lips, then tilted his head back in thought. "Here's a notion. Instead of scrambling over the walls like your tree-climbing evolutionary ancestors, you could help me attend to the puzzle of what this room is for, and why one would be put in it, and how one would get people out of it."

"It's an oubliette," Dureena snapped. "One doesn't get people out of it. People are put here to starve to death. Which is what is going to happen to us if we can't signal the Excalibur or find our own way out."

Max rolled his eyes. "Ah, yes, because you've studied this planet's literature extensively, and thus know all about their prison facilities."

"No, but I've been in plenty of oubliettes before." She scowled at him, then up at the distant skylight. "I still think if you gave me a boost I might be able to reach a path up there. Or you could at least lend me your flashlight."

"Why?" He looked up and blinked at her owlishly, genuinely puzzled. "There's still plenty of light."

The sunlight streaming through the ceiling would soon dim, but for the past hours they'd had the warm glow penetrating to almost every corner of their trap. "Every little bit helps," she said.

"Perhaps we should focus on the perceptual problem," Max said, closing his notebook and leaning back more comfortably in his corner. "We cannot see the way out because we are looking at this from the wrong perspective."

The challenge, there, the academic against a lifetime of knowledge, the words on his page against the dirt under her fingernails. Dureena felt the prickling at the back of her neck like high canyon winds, ready to send her off her feet. "Trust me," she said, feeling the heavy irony on her tongue, "I know all about finding ways out."

"I'm certain you have some practical experience," he said, levering himself to his feet and beginning to pace the circumference of the room. She turned, slowly, keeping him in her vision but not letting him take all her attention. The wind outside rattled branches against the skylight; dappled shadows appeared on the walls above. "But there is a point beyond which mere experimentation becomes data collection without theory to hold it together."

Dureena narrowed her eyes. "Max, have you ever had to break out of a high-security cell with nothing but your unlucky cellmate's leg bones to dig with?"

As she thought, the bit of grotesquerie touched a nerve. His eyes widened, then he scoffed. "Yes, yes, you're very street. Most impressive. No, we didn't all have to chew through the sinews to get our leg out of the trap. Some of us just tried to get tenure."

"Is that why you're so miserable?" she asked as though she couldn't be less interested. "Because that's the worst indignity you've suffered?" she added with a thought, twisting the knife.

"No, the worst indignity I've suffered is getting saddled with you," Max said, but it sounded like a reflex, letting his mouth run while he was thinking about something else. He'd stopped in front of the west wall, and now had his flashlight out, highlighting the tiled surface. "What are these for?"

Dureena shrugged. "Why do people normally tile a wall?"

"Decoration. Waterproofing." He looked around, down at the floor. "There are surfaces which aren't tiled, which could be wear, but there aren't any drains on the floor, so it probably isn't to protect against water."

"Or blood," she reminded him.

"Or blood," he agreed. "So no executions, no sacrifices. Decoration? Religious?"

"There's no imagery," Dureena pointed out. She leaned against the wall and took another look towards the sky. "It's just a bunch of different colors. Some people like their oubliettes to look nice, when they're built. Don't know why. They're never going to look at them again."

"There aren't very many bones down here for a place where people are put to die," Max said.

"Scavengers," Dureena pointed out. "Big ones, little ones, ones with wings. You'd be surprised how many bones go that way."

Max scoffed again, staring at the colored tiles, fingernails scratching at the dirt and glaze. "Kefish," he said.

"What."

"Kefish, it's a word that comes up over and over again in their literature. Literally it translates to 'second choice,' but it really seems to mean 'there is always another chance.'" He waved, vaguely at head level, indicating the room and the sheer walls and their whole situation. "I don't believe that people so attached to second chances would leave a place like this without a way out."

"Mmmm," she mused. "Even people who believe in second chances tend to put their locks on the outside of their prison doors."

"But they do tend to have doors, not oubliettes," he countered. "I wouldn't think you'd be one to argue for giving up."

The accusation would have stung, coming from another member of the crew, of her strange new adopted family. But every family had a cousin who was wrong about everything, and every crew she'd worked with had one guy who thought he knew all the answers. "I wouldn't think you'd argue against reassessing," she jibed back. "Still don't think you can give me a boost up there?"

"Not high enough to make any difference, and I don't want to get dirt all over my clothes," he said. "You said these are different colors?"

"What?" The question distracted her from her rebuttal. "Of course they are."

He frowned and squinted at the tiles. "How's your color vision?"

"Just fine," she said evenly. "How's yours?"

"Perfect," he said. "But yours might be better." He touched the wall above the tiles. "What about this?"

"The paint? It's different colors, too. Why?"

For a moment Max was silent, peering at the peeling paint and chipped tiles, then he held up his hands, covering the paint above and between two nearly-adjacent tiles. "What about now?"

The change seemed immaterial, nonsense, the pale flesh of his hands against the wall and the tile, but suddenly the colors snapped into focus. "Wait... now they're the same. What did you do?"

"Perception," he said. "The paint looks similar enough to me that I can't see the contrast in the tiles, but you see different colors than I do, so you get an optical illusion of colors."

"Give me your flashlight," she demanded, and when he handed it over, she turned the glare of the beam on the tiles, with and without his hands in the way. "Well, I'll be damned. Are they all like that?"

"We can find out," he said, moving his hands between another pair of tiles. "See how useful it is to have someone else here to help find the clues to the way out?"

"All because you have terrible color vision," she said. "Since you're so afflicted, can't you tell if there are different colored tiles just by looking at them?"

"I'm too afflicted," he said. "It's not my fault that perfect human vision isn't the same as your species'. I suppose you get some benefits to make up for your capacity for annoyance."

His heart wasn't really in the words. The possibility of a way out had both of them focused. When she spotted the first tile that kept its gradation of shade, she tapped it immediately. "This one."

"Great!" Max straightened up and looked around, as though expecting a major change, a sudden door sliding open to freedom.

Dureena sighed. "Max, one of the first things I tried was pressing all the tiles looking for hidden doors."

"Right." He sighed. "Okay, let's keep going, maybe there's a pattern."

There was no pattern; the rest of the tiles frustratingly revealed as the same hue once the painted background was screened. Dureena traced the edges of the tile. "It could be a mistake," she offered.

Max shook his head. "You don't paint an optical illusion on your walls as a mistake. This was deliberate. No, this is a clue."

She left him staring at the wall and took another deliberate turn around the room. Contemplating, letting the pulse-beat of her bleeding finger keep time as she eyed the cracks and crevices, the vines and twigs, the splashes of color in geometric abstract patterns. Over on the tiled wall, Max was pushing every tile except the one she'd indicated, in various permutations. She snorted and cleared the vines away from the wall.

"Is there any other place in the room with that--"

"Color?" Dureena finished for him. "Like this mural?"

He walked over to stand beside her and squinted. "That's the same color?"

She traced the line of slightly deeper red through the pattern, like a trail of dried blood. "Here, this is."

"I can't even see that," he grumbled. "Good thing we're both here, or we'd have missed it completely."

"Yes, I suppose you do have your uses," she agreed, as her fingers found the end of the end of the painted trail and an almost-invisible lip in the stone. She dug her fingernails in and hissed as her split nail complained.

"Here, let me," Max said, stepping forward, and for once she let him, pride stinging but willing to let him get dirt under his own fingernails, just this once.

The stone shifted, a panel sliding aside to reveal a handle, rough metal rusting at the corner and the joint where it set into the wall.

"See?" Max said as he grabbed the handle and turned it with a groan. "Perspective."

A clunking noise, and a piece of the wall nearby dropped away, to reveal a closed grate, chained and locked. Dureena let herself smile, pulled her lockpicks from their resting place in her sleeve, and let her fingers walk her through the twists to their freedom.

When they emerged into the dimming sunlight on the other side of the tunnel, their communicators hissed back to life, out of range of whatever jamming effect had stymied them in the cell. "--Come in, Max, Dureena, are you there?" Gideon's voice suddenly came clear.

Dureena beat Max by a second. "Here, Gideon."

"Where the hell were you? Are you all right?"

Dureena shared a glance with Max, and shrugged. "Just getting some perspective."

"Yes," Max added, "Be careful in that palace building, captain, there are some tricky trapdoors."

"We'll see you in a few minutes, we're heading back to the shuttle." Dureena switched off her communicator and turned to Max, who was looking more self-satisfied than she would have thought. "An apology, for getting us stuck in there, would be nice."

"You know, we make a pretty good team," he said, sidestepping the issue. "My brains, your thievery. We should get stuck in mysterious alien prisons together more often."

"Sure," she offered as a peace gesture, and started her walk toward the city. "I could always use a spare femur to dig with."

Max hurried after her. "You're assuming that I'd die before you."

"Never said you had to be dead," she countered.

This time he laughed. "All right. I'm sorry for landing us in a trap."

She nodded her acceptance. "Nice job with the... what did you call it? Optical illusion?"

"Good job never giving up." They walked in silence for a while, back through the outermost buildings of the abandoned city. "And hey, we'll find a cure for this Drakh plague soon, I'm sure."

Dureena swallowed the sudden icy feeling in her throat, the reminder of how much was riding on their mission, the tiny colony of her people on the surface of an abandoned planet far from home. "Kefish, wasn't that what you said? There's always another chance."

"There's always another chance," Max echoed.

That thought sustained her all the way back to the shuttle as the sunlight slowly dimmed and the stars overhead came out.


End file.
